Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY Actually Scales

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY, despite its reputation for poor scalability due to a global lock issue, can be optimized for high-performance streaming applications. LISTEN/NOTIFY is a powerful tool that allows for low-latency notifications and pub/sub functionality within a Postgres database. While the criticism regarding its scalability stems from the global exclusive lock required during NOTIFY, which serializes transaction commits, this can be addressed by buffering notifications in memory and periodically flushing them in a batch transaction. This approach reduces contention on the global lock, allowing for efficient stream writes by leveraging Postgres optimizations like group commit. The implementation significantly improves throughput, achieving up to 60K writes per second with low latency, demonstrating that LISTEN/NOTIFY can be effectively used for scalable, low-latency streaming when optimized correctly.

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